The Spirituality of conflict and violence is an idea introduced to us by a great Benedictine Monk
called Thomas Cullinan OSB. He offers practical hints on how one can get
involved in the building of the community in obedience and humility, but this
once done well will always create conflicts at the end of the day, you either
become a matter for the sake of the Reign of God by dying severally or simply
become nice and go unnoticed as a missioner. H states “to participate in life,
we ought to be humble and obedient before a given reality, and this reality is that
of being witness to the truth”.
That means that we have to be artisans in God’s
world, artisans whose primary and only task is a loving and total response to truth.
We are called to look at the example of Christ who came to the world to bear
witness to the truth. (John 18:37). This truth is the present reality of the
peoples, present lives, what is happening to them, among them. The question we
have to confront is what does the divine love affair called “Reign of God” look
like? Sometimes we seem to divide the truth according to the arrogant life we
live, the western understanding of independence or individualistic attitude which
has come of age to the approach of freedom. It’s this freedom that keeps the self-intact
and demands the right to choose as one likes. The self-concerned, not
self-forgetfulness. It seeks to be free from reality and relations. It doesn’t receive
freedom and peace as a bonus and a gift.
If we are to reread and reexamine our actions to that of the
Gospel it will come clear that if our primary call is to a loving response to
truth, born out of the original obedience and humility, then we cannot avoid
conflict. It’s an inherent part of living for truth, its conflict unsought bur
freely accepted. The gospel is not about mere private virtues and individual
spirituality. It’s about living in the public forum in the light and truth of
God’s love affair with people, it’s to understand why Jesus passed through non-comprehension, conflict in our own times. Most of the world evils in this
society is being perpetrated by high-minded people who seek themselves as
virtues (clever devils). The virtuous are those who are good at crashing others
in the religious community and in the church, whether they know it or not. Jesus
was always in favor of the naughty and be in collision with the well-behaved.
The question one may ask is why?
In the Gospel of John 9, we come across a community that was
primitive to assume that sickness or affliction should be linked with personal
or family guilt. This is what we modern people of God have fallen into and we
find that we are not sick ourselves but fickle. Fickle means changing
frequently, especially as regards one’s loyalties or affections. “Rabbi, who
sinned, this man or his parents, for him to have been born blind? Some Pharisees
said, “we are not blind surely!?” To these questions, Jesus answers: Neither he
nor his parents sinned. Blind?
If you were, you
would not be guilty but since you say “we see” your guilt remains”. This man
born blind has the vigour to go head-on with those in authority, his challenge could
be as saying, to the government minister of defence: why are you so fascinated
by the peace movement? Are you going to join it? The man’s parents cannot
disown him, he is their son, and yet not wanting to be counted among the
subversives. Jesus was not in conflict with the Law, the Torah as such, it was
a confrontation with the treatment of the Law as an ideology.
The word “ideology” has a long-time historical unfolding of many
years. Not in its neutral sense of the sets of ideas which any culture or class
which has to interpret the world, but pejorative sense, referring to a set of
ideas, theories, and principles which have ceased to be relative tool for
understanding reality and have become an absolute, a machine, into which
reality is fitted. Today we have been enticed with the western individualist
consumerism, Islamic fundamentalism. This has turned into violent forms in
Latin America, parts of Africa, Philippines, South Korea, and Hong Kong, etc. If
the church has to confront this reality it will have to admit that it will be
conflict and what we are doing today, we tend to be nice and hard in picture.
Thomas Cullinan delves into ideological characteristics:
High minded: These the ideological mentality is long-cherished thinking, what in the west they call
individualism, Marxism, the Law, each is at the root of bad or careless
thinking, but careful thinking in real matters of values. Very plausible,
mentally attractive, even addictive.
Limited Criteria:
the criteria of economic reduce what is perceived as truth, to a limited
realm, leading to totalitarianism, even in the names of democracy and freedom.
Simplifying criteria:
Simplifying the ambiguities, varieties, contradictions, and mystery of human
reality.
Righteous: A great
sense of righteousness and freeing the self from the sense of own guilt.
In Jesus’s time, it was impossible for many people especially associates in Galilee to keep the Law. These were, therefore, “accused
and outside the Law” and in some way guilty. The voices are heard in our ears
when undertone hatred and blames start flying around, for example in times of
overseas and donation packages: “If those people “over there” chose to work and
better themselves, they would do so than depending on us”.
Guilt misfit:
these brand themselves as being in the bondage of fate, the bondage of sin
developing a language that is pervasive. Jesus liberated the blind man not only
from being called “sinner through and through from birth”.
No oppositions: “who
is not for is against us” A strong ideology, having to set the scene as a simple confrontation between two diversities has no place for the third
parties. Everyone is either Loyal or the Enemy, or a dupe of the terrorist’s a regime based on “natural security”.
Ideology legitimizes extreme nationalism in a high minded
way so that it is obvious that it is better that one man even tens of
thousands should die for the sake of the people. Anyone who is not one hundred percent for us, then he is one hundred percent in the camp of the enemy. No
room to create alternative forms this can be seen in central America an example
in time, some countries in the horn of Africa, ideologies are self-justifying
and once you hear them say “we told you” that is a pure statement of a junta a regime that has literally killed the opposition, bought them and now they are singing their songs as what befell Nicolò
Machiavelli with the Medici in Florence. “Had
Nicolò Machiavelli, who until now had never bowed down
before money or power, been broken at last? Does his prince show his readiness
to change his political colors and abandon his once fearless style of addressing
great men, in the hope that Medici might shed their suspicion and restore him
to the fold of Florentine politics?” (Erica Benner, Be Like the Fox: 246 (2017).
Perversion of
language: Because those in authority want to justify their stay, they are
ready to pervert language to its own ends. The conviction of being right is a
stumbling block to seeking truth and perceiving what taking place is really. The
use of language is manipulative in communicating the truth. This affects even
the mainstream churches, at what point of saying, in the name of Christianity,
that we can only be peacemakers from a position of power? Is that not the
ultimate denial of the truth?
Jesus lived for liberation and hope where we as the church
should stand today. It’s along these lines, not along moralistic lines, that we
should see Jesus as being counted among the sinners, and that we should
understand the Lamb of God who takes away sin. It should be good news that
divides the hearts of many, the good news that should confront much that is
accepted uncritically, Good news that would divide us even from our own
brethren. Jesus did not come to bring peace at any price. The art of being
vagabonds, displaced persons, fools. Can we do it? And then not be right
ourselves.
How do we cope? What can we do? We need to get organized and
put ourselves in order, try harder to save ourselves. Jesus talks of the reign
of God is near at hand, among us, yet to be but already here. He told the
people that he could or couldn’t, enter it, but never said they were in it. It
demands preparation and predisposition that gift-receiving demands the social
justice required by the year of the Lord’s favor, and yet it was never merited.
Like all love affairs, God’s Reign was enigmatic, better talked of in stories
and celebration than in books and theses. It was recognized only those who know
it by experience. You could know it but not know about it. It was recognized only
by those knew it by experience. You could know it but not know about it. It’s
the love of God in people’s lives, his antecedent Reign, which urges us. It’s
not building something on his behalf. He is not this spectator God, wanting for
us to do great things in his name.
Once we are all truly alight, then we can’t but be
effective, being true to our calling, a candle burning truly. If you are, you
will give light, whether, or how, or when, or to as a great patron of God, but
will become transferred signs pointing beyond works, they will praise your
Father in Heaven. Vincent Donovan in his book entitled Christianity
Rediscovered gives an account of Maasai in Tanzania. A Maasai elder speaking
says for Fr. Donovan “ a person who really believes is like a lion going after
its prey” it’s nose and eyes give the speed to catch the prey, all the power of
its body is involved in the terrible death lead and single blow to the neck
with the front paw, the blow that actually kills. And as the animal goes down,
the lion envelops it in its arms (front legs) puts it to itself, and makes it
part of itself. This is how the lion kills. This is the way a person believes.
This is what faith is. When you are afraid of the bend, having friends to go
around the bend with is precious or even guidance from those who have already
gone around.
Communion is based on a living conversation with the poor, the
forgotten, the voiceless, the wounded, and then disposed of. So we carry in
ourselves, wherever we are, deep suffering, we bear wounds of love which
never heal, the wounds of the risen Lord. A Christian is not merely a striver
for liberation yet to come, but the bearer of a liberation of which the down payment,
the pledge, has already been made. It’s an enigmatic co-existence of suffering
and joy which makes our lives, especially in the community a living sign, from being a patron of God’s reign we are called to be instruments of the Reign, called to
freely, as it were normally.
A conversion always involves death. This side of
the grave, constant dying, only that new and freedom may be released in us, a
community of faith. Freedom from fear makes us invincible “you can’t kill me
for I have died already”. The way to contemplation is obscurity to obscure
that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing left in it that can be
grasped and cherished as heroic or even unusual. And so…there is a supreme
value in the ordinary routine of work and poverty and hardship and monotony
that characterizes the lives of the poor and uninteresting and forgotten people
in the world. We are not relaying artisans in God’s world, are we! We are God’s
work of art (Ephesians). All the time we think we are the lion, in the end, the
lion is God.
Cullinan, T., “A Spirituality for Conflict
and Violence”, in SEDOS, Trends in
Mission, toward the 3rd Millennium, (eds,) William Jenkinson –
Helene O’Sullivan, Orbis Book, New York 1993, 239-43.
Benner, C., Be like the Fox, Machiavelli’s Lifelong Quest for Freedom, Penguin
Books (UK) 2017.
Donavan, V., Christianity Rediscovery, Maryknoll, Orbis Book, 1978.
No comments:
Post a Comment